We compared SonicWall TZ and WatchGuard Firebox across several parameters based on our users' reviews. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Comparison Results: SonicWall TZ is highly praised for its user-friendly interface, robust features, and cost-effectiveness. However, there are areas that need improvement such as reporting, licensing, scalability, and support. On the other hand, WatchGuard Firebox is commended for its comprehensive features, ease of use, and reasonable pricing. However, it also has areas that need improvement including the interface, web blocker feature, reporting, customer support, security, configuration options, scalability, and integration.
"The most valuable features are simplicity, management, and that it's constantly evolving."
"SSL-VPN is very useful for us and has been very reliable."
"From the firewall perspective, the rules and policies are very sufficient and easy to use."
"Fortinet FortiGate's ease of management is the most valuable feature."
"The web tutor and automatic rules by schedule are good features."
"The most valuable feature is the FortiManager for centralized management."
"We are a visual effects company, and there have been a number of high profile security issues in our industry. This has brought us to a higher standard of security, which our clients are very keen on these days."
"The solution is stable."
"It's a stable solution."
"The most valuable feature of SonicWall TZ is the double authentication, where it asks for one password and again asks for a four-digit code, which changes every 30 seconds."
"The general feature is the antivirus policy, followed by the ransomware protection, and these are the features I was looking at."
"The solution's VPN is very good for stability and detecting threats."
"With the main firewall routing there, we can do connectivity point-to-point. On the low bandwidth we can connect in all the branches with my corporate office."
"The product is easy to deploy."
"The product’s filtering and URL-blocking features are valuable."
"I find the security we are able to do with the policies to be valuable. The monitoring is valuable as well."
"WatchGuard Firebox is the most powerful firewall for Wi-Fi security."
"Among the most valuable features is the ease of use — love the interface — of both the web interface and of the WatchGuard System Manager."
"The reports are detailed."
"The tool's most valuable feature is the dashboard."
"WatchGuard has a very easy VPN and branch office VPN setup, so we use those pretty extensively."
"After conducting several tests I found the antivirus is working very well. Additionally, they have a very interesting feature, DNS WatchGuard, which is checking DNS requests for phishing, among other things, and it has caught a lot of unwanted attempts and attacks."
"Firebox operates effectively in the background, blocking potential threats without a need for constant monitoring."
"Efficient to setup, run, and maintain. Saving man hours and cost in the process."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve the logging and reporting. Additionally, the next-generation application's policies should be improved. When they were released they had bugs."
"Usually, we sell the bundle with the UTM or threat management piece with IPS, IDS. Other providers, such as Palo Alto, are ahead in terms of safe functionality. So, for me, delivering truly safe service is probably something that still needs to be improved."
"They should offer special pricing to premium partners and customers."
"One of the features that I would like to have is to do with endpoint production, it should be integrated. For example, the firewall gets notified of any kind of forensic event that needs to be done, such as if there is a ransomware attack and how it originated, all those records have to be available from the firewall, which is not."
"We had a minor problem where there was a major system upgrade on the hardware platfrom and the Mac client was not available as soon as it might have been. The PC client was available immediately, but we had to wait a month or so, before there was a mac client. I was slightly irritated that it was not ready on time, but it was eventually resolved."
"The renewal price and the availability could be improved."
"The pricing could be a bit better, especially when you consider how they have the most basic offering priced."
"It should provide better visibility over the network and more information in the form of reports for the end users. Its installation should also be easier."
"I can't get the support that I need from SonicWall."
"If the operation increases and the bandwidth consumption increases, it does not perform as per the expectations."
"There can be an improvement in analysis and reporting. We need enhancement on the reporting side."
"It could probably be more user-friendly, and it could be more scalable with releases and subscriptions."
"The cost of the solution has room for improvement."
"I'd like to have cloud management at no additional cost. Unfortunately, leveraging SonicWall's cloud management capabilities is cost-prohibitive, so we don't use it. They should have a reasonable subscription or offer it to us at no cost as an MSP."
"Sonic Analyzer could be improved. It's difficult to manage and not very intuitive."
"The solution must provide more ports."
"The reporting is a little on the weak side. I would like to see a better reporting set and easier drill-down options."
"The documentation for the System Manager/Dimension configuration, could be a little bit clearer... The use case where you have multiple sites with multiple firewalls, and one site that has the System Manager server and the Dimension server, wasn't really well defined. It took me a little bit of digging to get that to actually work."
"There's always room for improvement, especially if the threats are getting more sophisticated and the IT department cannot sufficiently meet this kind of sophistication with their own knowledge and experience. Knowing that this solution can get up to the level of addressing a lot of these threats is something that everybody wishes for. If we look at the dark web and the lawful web, they are two opposites, and if these two good and bad collide in the world of the internet, you want the best possible product—especially if you cannot get to that point of knowledge. I am just an individual and end user, with limited knowledge of usage. That's why I say there's always room for improvement, from their side and also from mine, because by knowing exactly what they can achieve and the knowledge that they can get on an everyday basis, and the portion that is understandable to me, it's an improvement for them as well."
"I would like to have a little more control over access points and the ability to see the bandwidth that is passing through a specific access point. We are not able to see that. We can see what traffic is passing through the Firebox itself, but we can't identify if it is coming from a particular access point or not."
"The level of support from WatchGuard is not as good."
"The solution can improve by adding a feature to tag a MAC address of a computer system in the policy and more IP configuration settings."
"I don't think I can get a full-blown DNS client from it. I've been trying to have DNS services. It has forwarding, but I don't get the services of a full DNS client. My main difficulty with it is that I can't run a complete service. I need NTP. I need DNS. I need DHCP for my domain, but I only get forwarding. As far as I can tell, I don't get caching and the kinds of reporting and registration needed to host a DNS for a domain. I have to have a separate solution for that."
"The pricing could be improved. It is definitely one of the more expensive products."
SonicWall TZ is ranked 12th in Firewalls with 78 reviews while WatchGuard Firebox is ranked 13th in Firewalls with 80 reviews. SonicWall TZ is rated 8.0, while WatchGuard Firebox is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of SonicWall TZ writes "Has efficient user access control feature and good technical support services ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of WatchGuard Firebox writes "Offers a streamlined deployment, intuitive interface and robust security features". SonicWall TZ is most compared with Sophos XG, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, SonicWall NSa and Cisco Secure Firewall, whereas WatchGuard Firebox is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Meraki MX and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our SonicWall TZ vs. WatchGuard Firebox report.
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